A decades-old Morinville church is set to receive its one true home, thanks to a gift from a local land developer. The Father's House Christian Fellowship’s Pastor Greg Fraser stated that he strongly believes in providence.
“Oh, absolutely. It’s a pretty exciting story for sure for us,” he said, after revealing that the church had finally successfully negotiated to have Landrex donate the old King of Kings Lutheran Church building on the north of St. Albert. The deal worked out pretty well perfectly for all parties involved.
He said it was a thrill to finally let the cat out of the bag after months of secrecy.
“That was a huge moment in our church. The leadership was aware that we were doing all these things ... before we even told our congregation. The day we told our congregation ... it was quite a moving moment for our church to realize that we weren’t going to be waiting years to be in a building. We would be in a building in a year.”
The 975-square-metre building has been sitting vacant for a few years since the old Lutheran church moved to another location. In the same time period and extending back even further, The Father's House had been setting itself up to consolidate its three separate locations throughout Morinville: one for its services, another for the Christian school, and lastly, the administration.
Several years ago, they began their campaign to begin the journey, with a decent bank account being the first milestone.
“We’ve needed space for quite some time. We raised enough money to basically get our plans drawn for a new building and then prep our land. So, that’s what we had done. Then we were getting around for the next phase after having prepped the land last year and then fundraise toward the actual building, which was going to cost us close to $7 million. Quite an epic challenge.”
He added that, because of the church’s focus on people first and everything else on a scale of relative importance, they never wanted to get caught up in a “big building program.”
As fate – or divine intervention – would have it, he was driving through the north of St. Albert early last summer and noticed that Landrex had purchased the 10-hectare church site just north of Erin Ridge, on the corner of St. Albert Trail and Coal Mine Road.
How incredible it would be to have a building like that for ourselves, he thought, leaving the matter at that. That’s when the ‘voice of God’ spoke, repeating herself for effect.
“So, after a few months of my wife continually saying, ‘You need to phone them. You need to phone them,’ and then finally another wife from our congregation said, ‘You need to phone them,’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ So we called them.”
Landrex was happy to get the call. After some investigation, they determined that the building could be moved to their land but only after being separated into four more manageable chunks. Those cuts actually make the building more appropriate to the fellowship’s needs.
“It’s basically completely deconstructing the building in order to reconstruct it. The interesting thing is where one of the cuts has to happen goes right through the current sanctuary of the church. Because of the way we cut, we actually cut right along with the joists so we can just add in joists, and expand, accordion out the sanctuary area. The plan is to put it on a basement. Really, what we’re going to be doing is doubling the square footage that’s currently there.”
The process has slowly but surely begun, leading toward a summertime move, and culminating with a grand reopening in January 2018. Its new site will be located on Secondary Highway 642 west of Morinville. The congregation is so pleased to have this fortuitous gift seemingly from above that they have organized a special event to add further funding to the move. God-Father... A Moving Love Story will be held on March 25. Details at www.tfhchurch.ca.
And when that first service happens a year from now, The Father’s House think that it can help the King of Kings Church heal from losing its church and land while offering its own congregation a grand moment to lead them all into the future.
“The dream for us is to be able to celebrate with them one day. All the work that you did is not lost. That’s the positive side of that painful part for them, I’m sure.”
